"‘The Freethinker’ was projected in a cinema in Stockholm for
a few days. The video has been shown at several film festivals, notably the
Festival of Festivals in Toronto (at the Art Gallery of Ontario), and in
Manosque, France, at the invitation of organizer Pascal Privet. The film
received several very sympathetic reviews in the Swedish press at the time,
including by Ingamaj Beck in Aftonbladet. The following review appeared in the
local Boston press after 'The Freethinker' was screened in a retrospective of
my films at the Carpenter Center in Harvard University, January 2001:

'"The first, and greatest, of August Strindberg's
misfortunes was his birth." This initial sentence of a 1960s biography on
the Swedish playwright, poet, and social critic appears late in Peter Watkins's
four-and-a-half hour video investigation of Strindberg, and by that time it
makes a lot of sense. Born into a life of poverty and misery, Strindberg found
his initial success as a writer soon followed by charges of vulgarity and
blasphemy, that left him with a permanent sense of persecution.

The playwright also found himself caught in the complexities
of several contradictions between Socialism and Christianity, intellect and
emotion, and, most crucial, female and male. His opposition to some goals of
the women's suffrage movement has made him one of the most perfect exemplars of
misogyny in Western literature. These various antagonisms, and three failed
marriages, led Strindberg to the brink of psychological collapse in 1896. From
then until his death, in 1912, he created a gentler, more expressionistic art
typified by A Dream Play ...

Watkins spent two years teaching video production to a
high-school class near Stockholm; The Freethinker is the collage-like result of
that class's work. Using scenes from Strindberg's life and plays, photographs
of the writer, his family, and 19th-century Sweden, ad hoc discussions by
observers of the issues raised in the narrative, and interrogations of
characters by other observers, Watkins and his student cobble together a
non-linear biographical study that is not east to grasp but rewards the effort.
The extreme length of the work and its deliberate non-sequential pacing seem at
first to be impositions, especially on those occasions when Watkins repeats a
scene. But these repetitions allow you to reconsider what you believe you know,
and to think more fully about what you're seeing than most films allow.' (The
Boston Phoenix, January 2001)"